We're excited to announce the first Ara Developers' Conference, to be held April 15-16, 2014. The Developers' Conference will be held online, with a live webstream and interactive Q&A capability. A limited number of participants will be able to attend in person at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

We plan a series of three Ara Developers' Conferences throughout 2014. The first of these will focus on the alpha release of the Ara Module Developers' Kit (MDK). The MDK, which we expect to release online in early April, is a free and open platform specification and reference implementation that contains everything you need to develop an Ara module.

Project Ara is that modular smartphone concept Google/Motorola unveiled last year. I'm excited to see that it's actually moving beyond concept to arrive in developers' hands. I love crazy, pie-in-the-sky innovation like this. Google is really getting all PARC-y lately.

The point is that one was responsible for so much foundation technology, the results of which are so pervasive now, that we generally completely take them for granted.

Google glass is very interesting though, as is that robot company they recently purchased. And google maps, and Youtube which they purchased was is great too. I'm still annoyed about the purchase and then shutdown of Deja though.

Who knows, 10 years from now we may take self-driving cars and modular smartphones as granted.

I can almost imagine conversations like "back in those days, people threw and entire smartphone away -screen, battery and all- just because the SoC got old and couldn't newer run apps or the SoC manufacturer ceased driver support (see Galaxy Nexus)", or "back in those days, people sat in traffic with their feet on the pedals, instead of doing some teleworking catching up in that time".

Who knows, 10 years from now we may be able to travel faster than sound !

We may be even able to freely install any software and operating systems on the computers we own !

Sorry for being sarcastic, I am a bit skeptical about all the inventions mentioned above : Self driving cars, google glass, internet balloons...

The modular smartphone is strange, there is no information on the website. They put an FPGA : Great ! They will remove it with series production : Sad !

The idea that people will want to tinker and upgrade their phone is, IMHO, completely crazy and the integration makes such operations difficult and will reduce reliability (flimsy connectors...).
Like PCs, and washing machines, there will come a day where people will make tradeoff between durability and price. Performance will be good enough. People don't upgrade their dishwasher.

With the tendancy of having a rectangular glass slate the ultimate greatness in design, (this is what excites Thom ;-), it may even kill the "fashion" impulse for changing phones.

Though I doubt modular smartphones will catch on ...see what happened with PCs (now predominantly laptops, much less modular than the PCs of old). People don't really threw away working mobile phones, that's a bit of a strawman - they very often resell them.